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When Chad and Keri McCartney say their infant daughter, Macie Hope, is born again, they aren’t referring to religion — the month-old miracle baby really was born twice.
The first “birth” was about six months into Keri McCartney’s pregnancy, when surgeons at Texas Children’s Hospital took the tiny fetus from Keri’s womb to remove a tumor that would have killed Macie before she was born.The second time was on May 3, when the McCartneys welcomed their surgically repaired — and perfectly healthy — baby girl into the world.

The happy couple talked from the hospital, where they were joined by Dr. Darrell Cass, the fetal surgeon who led the team that performed a surgery that has been successfully completed fewer than 20 times around the world. In Macie’s case, he said, “We were very, very fortunate. It really turned out perfectly.”

The McCartneys’ story began in Keri’s 23rd week of pregnancy, when the couple took their entire family to their obstetrician’s office to discover the sex of the baby Keri was carrying.Everyone went into the ultrasound room, eager to see the image of the fetus displayed on the screen. “All of a sudden the ultrasound tech had a very concerned look on her face,” Chad said. “She rushed our kids out of the room and then informed us there was a large mass on our baby.”

The ultrasound image showed what looked like a balloon growing out of Macie’s tailbone — except that it was full of blood vessels and was as big as the fetus itself. The tumor was noncancerous ... but still deadly.

“This tumor was gigantic,” Cass said. “It was the size of a grapefruit.”

The McCartneys’ obstetrician had never seen such a tumor in all her years of practice. After some research, she discovered that Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston — six hours away from the family’s Laredo home — was one of only three hospitals in the world that specialized in such conditions.“This is incredibly rare. It’s about one in 40,000 births,” Cass said. “Many times, these tumors can grow and remain small and they don’t really affect the fetus very significantly. In Macie’s instance, this tumor grew incredibly rapidly … and basically it was stealing the blood that her body needed to grow. She would have died if nothing had been done.”

Macie Hope didn’t make it the entire nine months, but, Cass said, “The pregnancy lasted another 10 weeks, which allowed Macie to recover from this tumor that had been killing her.”On May 3, Macie Hope was born again, this time to stay. She and her mother have remained at Texas Medical Center since as they both fully recover from the miracle surgery. Macie still has a large scar on her backside, which surgeons say can be repaired when she gets older.

A major theme of Australian performance artist Stelarc is the concept that the human body is obsolete. As such, his past artwork included hanging himself on a flesh hook suspension, attaching electrodes that control his body and then connecting the control to the Internet so those who logged on can move his muscles at will, and saving his liposuctioned fat for an exhibition. Now, he's on to modifying the human body, starting with a lab-grown ear implanted on his forearm!

A curious new trend in body modification is implanting magnet in a finger. Apparently, this gives the "implantee" a new sense of being able to "feel" electromagnetic fields. According to Huffman, the magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other recipients found they could locate electric stovetops and motors, and pick out live electrical cables. Appliance cords in the United States give off a 60-Hz field, a sensation with which Huffman has become intimately familiar. "It is a light, rapid buzz," he says.

Alex Finch acquired these Pokémon balls subdermal implants. According to him, he has been a fan of the Pokémon videogame and anime franchise since he was in third or fourth grade, and that he chose to get six Poké Ball tattoos in reference to the number of Poké Balls which can be carried in the original videogames. He also noted that the tattoos shown are “just the beginning” as he plans to get additional tattoos of videogames, cartoons, and anime icons on the rest of the arm, including more Poké Balls.

After a severe Human Pappiloma Virus (HPV) infection, Dede Koswara, a 35-year-old Indonesian fisherman, was dubbed the "tree man" because of the gnarled warts all over his body. He first noticed the warts on his body after cutting his knee as a teenager. Over time, Dede was sacked from his job, deserted by his wife and shunned by neighbours as the horn-like extensions covered much of his body and stopped him working. He has two children. After his case received widespread publicity, donations from the public and government help allowed him to get treatment, and in 2008, six kilos of warts were surgically removed from his body.

Sanju Bhagat's stomach was once so swollen he looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe. Living in the city of Nagpur, India, Bhagat said he'd felt self-conscious his whole life about his big belly. But one night in June 1999, his problem erupted into something much larger than cosmetic worry. Mehta said that he can usually spot a tumor just after he begins an operation. But while operating on Bhagat,Surgeon saw something he had never encountered. As he cut deeper into Bhagat's stomach, gallons of fluid spilled out — and then something extraordinary happened. "First, one limb came out, then another limb came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some limbs, jaws, limbs, hair."

At first glance, it may look as if Bhagat had given birth. Actually, Surgeon had removed the mutated body of Bhagat's twin brother from his stomach. Bhagat, they discovered, had one of the world's most bizarre medical conditions — fetus in fetu. It is an extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cordlike structure that leaches its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

A West Virginia man's family claims inadequate anesthetic during surgery allowed him to feel every slice of the surgeon's scalpel - a trauma they believe led him to take his own life two weeks later. Sherman Sizemore was admitted to Raleigh General Hospital in Beckley, W.Va., Jan. 19, 2006 for exploratory surgery to determine the cause of his abdominal pain. But during the operation, he reportedly experienced a phenomenon known as anesthetic awareness -- a state in which a surgical patient is able to feel pain, pressure or discomfort during an operation, but is unable to move or communicate with doctors.

According to the complaint, anesthesiologists administered the drugs to numb the patient, but they failed to give him the general anesthetic that would render him unconscious until 16 minutes after surgeons first cut into his abdomen. Family members say the 73-year-old Baptist minister was driven to kill himself by the traumatic experience of being awake during surgery but unable to move or cry out in pain.

If you look to this picture you might think that Janet and Jane Cunliffe are twins. But they are not, they aren't even sisters. They are mother and daughter! Janet spent more than $13,000 on plastic surgery in a desperate effort to bridge the 22-year age gap between herself and her daughter. They now have flowing blonde hair, hourglass figures and slender, toned legs. Mother and daughter both weigh in at 8st and, except for a couple of inches in height (at 5ft 6in, Jane is two inches taller) and different eye colors (Jane's are brown, Janet's are blue) they are virtually identical.

A condition caused by the ingestion of silver, the Argyria's most dramatic symptom is that the skin becomes blue or bluish-grey colored. On 2008, ABC reporters interviewed Paul Karason, 40 year-old who's skin turned blue after he used colloidal silver to ease his ailments. It started a decade ago, when he saw an ad in a new-age magazine promising health and rejuvenation through colloidal silver. Karason sent away for a kit for making colloidal silver -- a home brew of microscopic silver particles suspended in water. For a while, he was drinking at least 10 ounces a day as a cure for arthritis. "I had arthritis in my shoulders so bad I couldn't pull a T-shirt off. And the next thing I knew, it was just gone." he explained the media, but these claims have no basis in science and after a couple of months, his whole skin turned blue. "I kind of hoped it would fade off!" But it didn't fade off. Argyria is permanent.

On 2008, a Chinese man named Huang Chuncai underwent surgery to remove a 20kg or 44 pound tumor on his face. The surgery was successful but due to the large size of the tumor, only a part of it was removed at that time. Just a few days ago, Huang Chuncai went into the operating room again to remove another part of that facial tumor. This time, it was a large 4.5kg (9.9lb) chunk of flesh from his face. The tumor was originally 23kg in total. This still leaves 17.5kg of facial tissue from this tumor on his face (1kg was removed in the first surgery and 4.5kg was removed in the second surgery). Huang Chuncai suffers from Neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic disorder that causes growth on nerve tissues.

Some identical twins do everything in tandem, from coming down with chickenpox to donning tutus for ballet lessons. But Jo and Kerry Burton have taken this fact to a whole new level. When Jo decided to have cosmetic surgery on her nose, Kerry followed suit. And since that day, the sisters have spent £60,000 on a host of operations - all carried out at the same time by the same doctors - to ensure they cannot be told apart. They even had to have their initials written on their bellies so the surgeon knew who was who. At age 34, they both have had a breast enlargement, eye-lift, permanent make-up tattoos and Botox jabs.

According to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , pemphigoid gestitionis is a skin condition in which blisters appear on the abdomen and, in the worst cases, over large regions of the body. Women can develop the condition during the second or third trimester and after giving birth. In the rarest of cases, children can be born with the rash.

Joanne Mackie, 28, developed agonizing blisters and an excruciating rash shortly after giving birth to son James. The painful welts across her back, legs, arms and chest caused her so much pain that she could not hold the newborn, and was forced to cover her arms in muslin cloth. After a few months the rash was gone but the mother-of-one's skin had been left scarred with dark patches where the blisters once were.